Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

“When I was a kid, I loved sports. When I got to high school, I went out for football, baseball, basketball, golf, and tennis, in that order, before I went for swimming. I kept plugging away. I figured I’d just keep going from one sport to the next until I found something that I could really fall in love with.”

Marc Vetri

Julia Child,

“Really, the more I cook, the more I like to cook,” she later told her sister-in-law. “To think it has taken me forty years to find my true passion (cat and husband excepted).”

“There are a lot of things where the subtleties and exhilarations come with sticking with it for a while, getting elbow-deep into something. A lot of things seem uninteresting and superficial until you start doing them and, after a while, you realize that there are so many facets you didn’t know at the start, and you never can fully solve the problem, or fully understand it, or what have you. Well, that requires that you stick with it.”

passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.

Longitudinal studies following thousands of people across time have shown that most people only begin to gravitate toward certain vocational interests, and away from others, around middle school.

Second, interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient. This is because you can’t really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won’t.

“One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves.” Without experimenting, you can’t figure out which interests will stick, and which won’t.

The emotion of boredom is always self-conscious—you know it when you feel it—but when your attention is attracted to a new activity or experience, you may have very little reflective appreciation of what’s happening to you.

Third, what follows the initial discovery of an interest is a much lengthier and increasingly proactive period of interest development. Crucially, the initial triggering of a new interest must be followed by subsequent encounters that retrigger your attention—again and again and again.

Bernard Leach,

Finally, interests thrive when there is a crew of encouraging supporters, including parents, teachers, coaches, and peers. Why are other people so important? For one thing, they provide the ongoing stimulation and information that is essential to actually liking something more and more. Also—more obviously—positive feedback makes us feel happy, competent, and secure.

But the reality is that our early interests are fragile, vaguely defined, and in need of energetic, years-long cultivation and refinement.

Even in the development of your interests, there is work—practicing, studying, learning—to be done.

Before those who’ve yet to fix on a passion are ready to spend hours a day diligently honing skills, they must goof around, triggering and retriggering interest.

But at this earliest stage, novices aren’t obsessed with getting better. They’re not thinking years and years into the future. They don’t know what their top-level, life-orienting goal will be. More than anything else, they’re having fun.

even the most accomplished of experts start out as unserious beginners.

Among Bloom’s important findings is that the development of skill progresses through three different stages, each lasting several years.

Encouragement during the early years is crucial because beginners are still figuring out whether they want to commit or cut bait.

A degree of autonomy during the early years is also important. Longitudinal studies tracking learners confirm that overbearing parents and teachers erode intrinsic motivation.

So, while my dad in Shanghai in 1950 didn’t think twice about his father assigning him a career path, most young people today would find it difficult to fully “own” interests decided without their input.

Jean Côté

In his research, professional athletes like Rowdy Gaines who, as children, sampled a variety of different sports before committing to one, generally fare much better in the long run. This early breadth of experience helps the young athlete figure out which sport fits better than others. Sampling also provides an opportunity to “cross-train” muscles and skills that will eventually complement more focused training. While athletes who skip this stage often enjoy an early advantage in competition against less specialized peers, Côté finds that they’re more likely to become injured physically and to burn out.

We need small wins. We need applause.

Yes, we need to practice. But not too much and not too soon. Rush a beginner and you’ll bludgeon their budding interest. It’s very, very hard to get that back once you do.

Sam Loyd,

When Shortz enrolled at Indiana University, it was his mom who found the individualized program that enabled Shortz to invent his own major: to this day, Shortz remains the only person in the world to hold a college degree in enigmatology—the study of puzzles.

I tried to picture myself in these situations. I tried to picture not freaking out. I tried to imagine doing what Jackie did, which was to notice that her oldest son was blooming into a world-class problem solver, and then merrily nurture that interest.

“Jeff comes up to us and is telling us all the science behind it, and I listen and nod my head and ask a question every once in a while. After he walked away, my friend asked if I understood everything. And I said, ‘It’s not important that I understand everything. It’s important that I listen.’ ”

“I’m always learning,” Will Shortz told me. “I’m always stretching my brain in a new way, trying to find a new clue for a word, search out a new theme. I read once—a writer said that if you’re bored with writing, that means you’re bored with life. I think the same is true of puzzles. If you’re bored with puzzles, you’re bored with life, because they’re so diverse.”

Jane Golden

At last count, she’s helped convert the walls of more than 3,600 buildings into murals; hers is the single largest public art program in the country.

Paul Silvia.

“So, interest—the desire to learn new things, to explore the world, to seek novelty, to be on the lookout for change and variety—it’s a basic drive.”

Sir John Templeton,

The key, Paul explained, is that novelty for the beginner comes in one form, and novelty for the expert in another. For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn’t been encountered before. For the expert, novelty is nuance.

But an expert has the accumulated knowledge and skill to see what I, a beginner, cannot.

Begin with the answers you’re surest of and build from there.

Don’t be afraid to guess.

Don’t be afraid to erase an answer that isn’t working out.

Keep asking questions, and let the answers to those questions lead you to more questions. Continue to dig. Seek out other people who share your interests. Sidle up to an encouraging mentor. Whatever your age, over time your role as a learner will become a more active and informed one. Over a period of years, your knowledge and expertise will grow, and along with it your confidence and curiosity to know more.

“The old in the new is what claims the attention,” said William James. “The old with a slightly new turn.”

Considering all the studies showing that gritty people typically stick with their commitments longer than others, it seemed like the major advantage of grit was, simply, more time on task.

some people get twenty years of experience, while others get one year of experience . . . twenty times in a row.

Kaizen is Japanese for resisting the plateau of arrested development. Its literal translation is: “continuous improvement.”

Anders Ericsson.

If you track the development of internationally renowned performers, you invariably find that their skill improves gradually over years.

The more you know about your field, the slighter will be your improvement from one day to the next.

That there’s a learning curve for skill development isn’t surprising. But the timescale on which that development happens is.